Consumer–brand assemblages in advertising: an analysis of skin,identity, and tattoos in ads

This paper discusses how the use of tattoos in advertising renders diverse brand–consumer assemblages visible. In considering advertising practitioners as professionals of entanglement, the paper emphasizes the embeddedness of practitioners’ use of tattoo symbolism in institutionalized marketing systems and in the cultural history of tattooing. In accordance with the recent emphasis on the importance of material devices for understanding contemporary sociality, this paper presents a semiotic analysis of a convenience sample of advertisements depicting tattoos. Tattoos are productive for the study of brand–consumer assemblages because they are situated on the human skin, which is a mediator between the individual and the socio-material world. Furthermore, tattoos reproduce discourses of both mainstream fashion and deviant subcultural identification, which imbue tattoo symbolism with communicative potency. This analysis demonstrates how the emergence of brand tattoos in advertising challenges the dominant consumer centrism in consumer research and suggests a networked, emerging understanding of the subject in which agency is distributed in socio-technical assemblages.     

Looking through Outdoor Advertising Images for Beauty in Argentina,Chile, Hungary,and Romania

This investigation expands scholarship on beauty and cross-cultural communication through the unique perspective of outdoor advertising. With a content analysis method 1,700 portrayals of men and women in outdoor advertisements, from four different cultures, including Argentina, Chile, Hungary, and Romania, were examined through a framework of advertising and consumer culture, globalization, and theories of beauty. The findings reveal differences across cultures and that beauty ideals are culture specific. Implications are important for practitioners in marketing communications to better understand subtle cultural variations in order to develop effective promotional programs required in the globalized economy.     

Advertising effectiveness from a consumer perspective

Communication effectiveness research is moving away from investigations of advertising’s forms, content and the degree and type of consumer involvement, to a greater focus on the process of reception and the social and cultural roles that advertising plays in society and in individual lives. This shift in emphasis has been influenced by communication and media studies, which have prioritised the psychological, social and cultural contexts within which consumers relate to commercial information and the roles that advertising media play in their lives. The focus on the ‘receiver’ as the key actor in the advertising communication process has also coincided with increasing interest in consumer culture theory, brand communities and the new service dominant logic of marketing. This paper provides a useful perspective from which to view contemporary developments in advertising effectiveness research, and has important implications for future studies.     

老字号品牌广告采用流行文化对品牌真实性的影响——一个有中介的调节模型

真实性是中华老字号品牌特有的优势。在当前激烈的市场竞争环境下，老字号品牌更新变得尤为重要。在老字号品牌更新过程当中，更新策略是否会对老字号品牌固有的优势与属性造成负面影响？这一问题在理论与实际上均具有深入探讨的迫切性。本章依托组织合法性理论，探讨了老字号品牌采用流行文化的广告中，消费者感知文化差异对品牌真实性的影响机制。实证研究以三个老字号品牌广告为样本，共搜集到631份有效数据。数据分析结果显示，在老字号结合流行文化元素的品牌广告中，消费者感知传统文化与流行文化的差异性对广告合法性与品牌真实性均有显著负向影响；广告合法性在消费者感知广告中文化差异与品牌真实性之间发挥部分中介作用；而消费者流行文化卷入度显著降低了广告中感知文化差异对广告合法性的影响，以及流行文化卷入度在广告中感知文化差异与品牌真实性之间的调节效应完全通过广告合法性起作用。该研究结果丰富了品牌真实性与品牌合法性领域相关文献，具有一定的理论与实践意义。     

Non‐white readings of whiteness

This paper explores the status of advertising practitioners as cultural intermediaries and uses that analysis to think through the contested relationship between consumption and production, and culture and economy. Using examples and illustrations from interview data with advertising practitioners in the UK, I explore how the circulation of rhetoric in the advertising industry functions as one form of mediation performed by advertising practitioners. I argue that practitioners’ role should not be understood solely in terms of a mediation between producer and consumer; instead, their role should be conceived in terms of a negotiation between multiple “regimes of mediation”, including that of the relationship between advertising agencies and their clients. Agencies perform commercial relationships, bringing them into being and constantly redefining them. Attending to these multiple modes of mediation opens up questions about the status of advertising, the role of cultural intermediaries, and the relationship between production and consumption, economy and culture.     

A Critical Review of the Costs of Advertising: a Transformative Consumer Research Perspective

This critical literature review incorporates a transformative consumer research (TCR) perspective in highlighting selected transgressions in corporate social responsibility that touch on (1) wealth consolidation, (2) environmental degradation, (3) commodification, (4) semiotic contamination, and (5) an erosion of accountability. It argues for a participatory approach among stakeholders in sustaining marketing research and assessing consumer policy that is both ethical and critical for academic marketers and practitioners alike. Transformative consumer researchers work to ensure that advertisements, messaging, and integrated marketing communications play a key role in promoting honesty and transparency. At the same time, transformative consumer research recognizes that advertising often masks the underlying costs incurred by society in general, and consumers in particular. TCR practices presently exist, and examples are presented to highlight these practices in consumer policy.     

Television’s Glocal Advertising in Veridical Product Narrative: A SE Asian Reception Study of Consumer Alignment/Alienation

Drawing on post‐Marxist screen reception studies in Malaysia, our article establishes a theoretical framework enabling analysis of consumer identification with/cultural distancing from television advertising and its aesthetics. We develop a hermeneutic model of audience response to audio‐visual text as ludic or play‐like in cognitively pursuing a meaning for veridical (mediated yet transparently accessible) marketing narrative sketches of everyday life transcended. Illustrating and illuminating this thesis, we report on a small SE Asian university research project whose participants articulate written reactions to two televised advertisements displaying transcultural product morphing (or glocal goods). Customer identification with consumers shown in television marketing is argued to be fundamentally hermeneutic. Brought into focus through analysis, that is, customer/consumer alignment is conceptual, conscious, and cultural where both project (expect and establish) a screen narrative shared epistemologically (as interpretative knowledge) and ontologically (as involving their activity). The reader’s propositional identification with a text’s perceived normative statement is enabled. On the other hand, discourses of consumer alienation emerge in response to advertisements inappropriately addressing audience horizons of expectation.     

The Panoptic Role of Advertising Agencies in the Production of Consumer Culture

Advertising's role in promoting an ideology of marketed consumption has been widely commented upon by critical theorists yet the mechanisms through which this influence becomes manifest remain relatively under-examined. In particular there has been no explicit examination of the mediating role of cultural knowledge in the production of ideologically driven advertising. This paper invokes the panoptic metaphor to position the knowledge gathered by and on behalf of advertising agencies as a major dynamic in the production of consumer culture. The consumer of advertising is a known entity for advertising agencies: the subject is watched, filmed, questioned, recorded, and tracked. Indeed, consumer biography and subjectivity itself has become material that is both produced and consumed by advertising agencies in order to produce culturally constitutive advertising. The paper integrates disparate literatures to situate knowledge of consumer culture at the hub of advertising's constitutive ideological influence.     

The use of culturally relevant stimuli in international advertising

International marketers are increasingly advocating the practice of incorporating cultural aspects in advertising. However, little is known about how these culturally relevant aspects are interpreted by the intended audience, or if their impact is universal for all members of the target culture. It is purposed that when a norm is incorporated in an advertisement, members whose self-concept is congruent with the norms of their culture will use normative rules to evaluate an advertised brand. Conversely, among members whose self-concept is deviant from their culture, advertisements incorporating norms will stimulate cognitive elaboration. An empirical example, using norms pertaining to group affiliation, investigates the use of cultural norms in advertising within two divergent cultures (the collective culture of Taiwan, and the individualist culture of the United States). Implications for marketing in collective (Asian) cultures are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Advertising effects on consumer welfare: Prices paid and liking for brands selected

The effect of advertising on consumer welfare has been the subject of dispute among economists, arising largely from disagreement among scholars regarding the persuasive versus the informative role of advertising. This paper reports two experiments that explore the welfare implications of advertising effects. Experiment 1 shows that the same advertisements can either increase or decrease prices paid for selected brands, depending on the degree to which the choice situation requires brands to be recalled in order to be considered. However, an increase in prices paid caused by advertising does not necessarily imply detrimental effects on consumer welfare. Experiment 2 shows that, even under circumstances in which differentiating advertising leads consumers to select brands with higher average prices, it can provide useful information to consumers that allows them to make purchases that are more in line with their personal tastes than are the choices of consumers not exposed to the advertisements.     

Consumer Culture Plots in Television Advertising from Nigeria and South Africa

The goal of this study is to respond to Taylor's recognition of the dearth of cross-national advertising and globalization studies in emerging markets. To fill this theoretical gap in the literature, we employ semiology to evaluate the plots and stories used in promoting global consumer culture in television advertisements from the two major economic powers in sub-Saharan Africa: Nigeria and South Africa. Unlike previous cross-national advertising and globalization studies that suggest that advertising is a reflection of cultural and global consumerism values, our findings suggest that advertisements reflect a romanticized view of middle-ground politics promoted by political establishments both at the national and the international level. We also found that the reflection of middle-ground politics in advertisements may be more prevalent in countries undergoing major ideological change.     

Reframing gender and feminist knowledge construction in marketing and consumer research: missing feminisms and the case of men and masculinities

Abstract

Gender has been theorised and studied in many ways and across different disciplines. Although a number of these theorisations have been recognised and adopted in marketing and consumer research, the significance of feminism in knowledge construction has largely remained what we would call ‘unfinished’. Based on a critical reframing of gender research in marketing and consumer research, in dialogue with feminist theory, this article offers theoretical and practical suggestions for how to reinvigorate these research efforts. The analysis highlights dominant theorisations of gender, relating to gender as variable, difference and role; as fundamental difference and structuring; and as cultural and identity constructions. This reframing emphasises various neglected or ‘missing feminisms’, including queer theory; critical race, intersectional and transnational feminisms; material-discursive feminism; and critical studies on men and masculinities. A more detailed discussion of the latter, as a relatively new, growing and politically contentious area, is further developed to highlight more specifically which feminist and gender theories are mainly in use in marketing and consumer research and which are little or not used. In the light of this, it is argued that marketing and related disciplines have thus far largely neglected several key contemporary gender and feminist theorisations, particularly those that centre on gender power relations. The potential impact of these theoretical frames on transdisciplinary studies in marketing and consumer research and research agenda(s) is discussed.     

Mapping the consumer‐subject in advertising

Traditionally marketing communication‐or more specifically advertising‐has been framed in terms of products/ services, needs and wants of consumers as if these were real givens, existing independently of the forms and acts of marketing communication itself. From this perspective, advertising is merely seen as a purveyor of information about products/services/needs between producers and consumers but hardly as actively implicated in shaping, not only the relation between the processes of production and those of consumption, but also the conception of the consumer‐subject. This paper makes a brief diachronic account of advertising with a view to highlighting how the consumer‐subject is represented. Whereas early advertising conceives of the consumer‐subject as a “rational” decision‐maker, aware of its needs and desire, more recent advertising constitutes the consumer‐subject in a hyperreal, dream‐like world, which seduces and spellbinds it.     

Development and validation of an emic scale to measure ad-evoked nostalgia in France

The practice of imbuing marketing communications with nostalgic reverie is prevalent in numerous countries. However, scholarly research investigating consumer response to such communication across cultures is lacking. This inquiry follows an emic approach examining and measuring ad-evoked personal nostalgia in France. Findings from five studies (N = 699) reveal significant differences in consumer reactions in France, as compared to earlier research based on American samples. Among the French, nostalgic advertising evokes personal memories and cultural nostalgia, contrasted to reports of past imagery, physiological and positive and negative emotional reactions in the United States. Furthermore, while cultural nostalgia is an important component of the French personal nostalgic experience, it is the personal memories that are the key to the creation of positive impressions about the ad and brand (brand heritage, brand bonds, and attitudes), and driving behavioral intentions. The emic French scale was found to be superior to an etic ad-nostalgia measure, in terms of fit and variance explained of the endogenous variables. The findings contribute to cross-cultural advertising and marketing research, and can be instructive for advertisers targeting the French market.     

Advertising and Structuralism The Myth of Formality

The growth of interest among sociologists in cultural forms of power and control has led to a concern with how advertisements communicate ideological messages. Structuralism offers a method by which advertisements can be analysed as complex semiotic structures. By a process of ‘coding’, underlying ideas are transformed into the surface arrangement of ‘signs’ which make up an advertisement. Therefore, the power of advertising lies in its ability to communicate ‘hidden’ ideological messages. To evaluate this approach two structuralist studies of advertising are examined. It is shown that the structuralist method employed in these studies itself rests upon hidden, unexamined assumptions. These assumptions vitiate the aims of the studies because they dissolve the everyday cultural reality of advertisements.     

Consumer Culture and Political Ideology Plots in Social Media Campaigns

A number of studies are devoted to explicating global consumer culture and political ideology plots in traditional advertising. Nevertheless, studies of these plots in social media campaigns are scarce. In order to fill this gap, our study examines consumer culture and political ideology plots utilized by global brands in social media advertisements targeted to US Millennials. Employing semiotic analysis, a series of advertisements from automotive, food and beverage, electronics, personal care products, fast food, athletics and financial sectors were evaluated and interpreted. Our findings uncovered one unique main plot labeled “identity-of-self” and three subplots: 1) successful and young living, 2) Peter Pan syndrome, and 3) purposeful connectedness. Implications for practice and directions for future work are suggested.     

Cross-cultural advertising communication: Visual imagery, brand familiarity, and brand recall

The focus of this paper is to address the issue of visual imagery in cross-cultural consumer research. The authors investigate the relationship between visual imagery, brand familiarity, and brand claim recall in two distinct cultural environments — the U.S. and Russia. The paper consists of two studies that explored imagery potency from the point of view of memory-evoking effects. The results suggest that image-intensive tools generate different returns depending on the level of brand familiarity and cultural media. The research findings may be of interest to marketing scholars studying cross-cultural consumer behavior as well as to practitioners operating in international advertising and global brand building.     

Modelling short-and long-term marketing effects in the consumer purchase journey

The role of advertising in consumer demand has received much attention in the marketing literature, where the marketing response model has emerged as a dominant analytical framework. In recent years, the basic model structure has evolved in three directions. Firstly, the incorporation of online paid, owned and earned media to accommodate the off-online path-to-purchase. Secondly, the introduction of consumer mindset metrics to capture the emotional foundations of brand-building. Finally, combinations of both to offer a complete view of the consumer purchase journey. In this paper, we argue that no one development successfully provides a fully holistic representation of the role of advertising. We thus propose a more comprehensive structural approach: one that combines search, paid, owned and earned media with a cointegrating mechanism for brand-building, linking mindset metrics directly to long-term base sales. The result is a practical modelling system for marketing mix practitioners with a rigorous economic and statistical foundation for short and long-term advertising effects. The proposed approach is applied to a global electronics manufacturer in the US market, where results fall into three broad areas. Firstly, we demonstrate how off and online marketing interact in the journey structure, the part played by search, owned and earned media and how specific media types play different roles. Secondly, we illustrate how consumer touchpoint experience is a key element of the process, improving measurement of in-store marketing. Finally, we show how consumer mindset metrics and social media play an important word-of-mouth role, with paid and earned media working together to drive long-term demand evolution.     

Marketing hedonics: Toward a psychoanalysis of advertising response

The author advances a psychoanalytic theory of advertising response to theorize the intersection of brand positioning, the semiotics of gender, and consumer desire in advertising discourse. Researchers traditionally focus on the iconic representation of desire in advertising imagery. However, by drawing upon Lacan's theory of scopophelia, the author focuses on the dialectical implication of the spectator/consumer's psychic drives in the visual semiotics of advertising discourse. The consumer identifies with the brand discourse primarily by means of projective identification with the voyeuristic gaze of the camera referenced in the image, and only secondarily because of perceived parallels between consumer lifestyle and the content of the advertisement. By way of illustration, the author analyzes the positioning of consumer desire in homoerotic advertising for Calvin Klein and Dolce & Gabbana, which draws upon resistance discourses in contemporary art to hold the consumer in a passion play of alternative sexualities and subject positions. Though these campaigns deconstruct the conventional binary opposition of male voyeur/female object of the gaze, they have contributed to the broad popularity of these brands because the brand discourse – logo, product placement, and rhetoric – restores a conventional logic to these advertisements that would have been censored from the worlds of popular culture and fine art.     

Promoting sustainability through social marketing: examples from New Zealand

This paper investigates the social marketing of sustainability in New Zealand and examines the usefulness of advertising campaigns to enlist and empower people, as both consumers and citizens, towards environmental care. It draws on discussions about ‘citizen‐consumer subjectivities’ and the model of the ‘political economic person’, which link sustainability and consumption through asserting people’s capacities as reflecting citizens. Printed advertisements by local and national government agencies about air pollution, fuel dependency and energy consumption are analysed to see whether advertising campaigns can operate on multiple levels for a range of audiences – desirable for broadening understanding of sustainable consumption and dealing with the complexity and experiential aspects of ‘doing’ sustainability. The advertisements analysed have an authoritative dimension that downplays this complexity and variability. The paper concludes that these advertisements do not go far enough to involve individuals in processes of co‐producing knowledge about sustainability, and to vest them with expertise in exercising sustainability in their daily lives. The implications are that advertising campaigns that engage with the complexity surrounding consumption in people’s modern lives, and with variability in meanings of sustainability, have the possibility of inciting citizen‐consumer political subjectivities.